In 2011, Stanford University offered three online courses, which anyone in the world could enroll in and take for free. Students were expected to submit homework, meet deadlines, and were awarded a "Statement of Accomplishment" only if they met our high grading bar. Together, these three courses had enrollments of around 350,000 students, making this one of the largest experiments in online education ever performed. Since the beginning of 2012, we have transitioned this effort into a new venture, Coursera, a social entrepreneurship company whose mission is to make high-quality education accessible to everyone by allowing the best universities to offer courses to everyone around the world, for free. Coursera classes provide a real course experience to students, including video content, interactive exercises with meaningful feedback, using both auto-grading and peer-grading, and a rich peer-to-peer interaction around the course materials. Coursera started operations in early 2012 and, as of June 2013, has 80 institutional partners, and over 3.7 million students enrolled in its 377 courses, which span a range of topics including computer science, business, medicine, science, humanities, social sciences, and more.

This talk will report on this far-reaching experiment in education, and why we believe this model can provide both an improved classroom experience for our on-campus students, via a flipped classroom model, as well as a meaningful learning experience for the millions of students around the world who would otherwise never have access to education of this quality. The talk will describe the pedagogical foundations for this type of teaching, and the key technological ideas that support them, including easy-to-create video chunks, a scalable online Q&A forum where students can get their questions answered quickly, sophisticated autograded exercises, and a carefully designed peer grading pipeline that supports the at-scale grading of more open-ended assignments.

Presenter

Pang
Wei Koh
Pang Wei Koh is Head of Course Operations at Coursera, a social entrepreneurship company that works with top universities to make the best education accessible to everyone around the world, for free. Pang Wei is employee #5 in the company, and led the formation of the 14-person Course Operations team, a key component of Coursera's model. He oversees the design, implementation, and support of all online classes on the Coursera platform, and works with faculty and staff from 80 partner institutions to push the envelope in digital pedagogy. Before Coursera, Pang Wei served as an officer in the Singapore Armed Forces, trained as a safari field guide in South Africa, and received his BSc and MSc in Computer Science from Stanford University, where he received the Terman Engineering Award, the school's most selective academic award. He is a medalist of the International Olympiad in Informatics and the International Chemistry Olympiad, and has published in a range of fields, including quantum computation, artificial intelligence, and online education. More recently, his work on computational cancer morphology at Stanford University was recognized by several awards, including the Ben Wegbreit Computer Science Thesis Prize, the David M. Kennedy Thesis Prize, the Firestone Medal for Excellence in Research, and the Ernest Walton Medal for Computer Science, awarded by the President of Ireland.

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